Robson Orr TenTen Award 2024

Denzil Forrester, Altar, 2024 (10/30) © Denzil Forrester – Commissioned by the Government Art Collection for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2024

Music and dance have inspired the work of Grenada-born British artist Denzil Forrester since the late 1970s. In Altar, a vibrant new print created for the Government Art Collection, Forrester captures a scene from the Falmouth Reggae Festival in Cornwall, where the artist now lives and works.

Taking paper and charcoal with him, Forrester created drawings of dancers at the festival on the spot. He would work to the length of a record and draw in the dark.

‘You have to give yourself over to that energy, that’s all it is.’

In the subsequent paintings made in his studio, the nightclub lights and sounds became the lines and forms that frame the raw energy of the dancers.

Forrester is best known for his depictions of dancehalls and clubs that capture crowds of people moving in unison with the beat of the music. As a young man in East London in the early 1980s, he was struck by the freedom of expression in the reggae and dub nightclubs of Hackney, a marked contrast to the daily lives of the Afro-Caribbean community in London at that time. He experienced the sounds and pressed bodies of the clubs as ‘a continuation of city life with some spiritual fulfilment’.

A previous acquisition by the Government Art Collection. Denzil Forrester, Family Living, 2004 © Denzil Forrester. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Vivid colour, gestural line and frenetic compositions are typical of Forrester’s work. He describes his childhood, surrounded by the natural beauty of Grenada, as helping him to appreciate colour. Now, he sees the ‘brilliant light’ of Cornwall infiltrating his work: ‘It’s like painting in Italy.’

While the figures in his work are crowded together, the spaces in between, in the artist’s words: ‘echo the music of the blues clubs, but are also reminiscent of the light that breaks through a forest, or the light that reflects from a nightclub’s mirrored ball. So sound, nature and the city are linked’.

The print was made and editioned by Simon Marsh of Jollytown editions. With thanks to Paupers Press.

// Making the print

// The artist

Denzil Forrester with his print, Altar.

Born in Grenada in 1956, Denzil Forrester moved to London in 1967. He now lives and works in Cornwall, UK. Forrester received a BA in Fine Art from the Central School of Art, London, in 1979 and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1983. He was awarded a scholarship from the British School at Rome in 1983–5; a Harkness Fellowship in New York in 1986–8; and the Morley Fellowship from Morley College, London, in 2019. In 2021, Forrester was awarded an MBE in The Queen’s New Year Honours list.

Denzil Forrester is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York.

// The Robson Orr TenTen Award

Ten years, ten prints. Every year, the Government Art Collection commissions an outstanding British artist to create a print, with the support of philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr.

Starting in 2018, and for the next ten years, the Government Art Collection will select outstanding British artists to create original print works for the Collection to display around the world. Artists including Hurvin Anderson, Tacita Dean, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Lubaina Himid, Rachel Whiteread, and Michael Armitage have created original works for the Collection for TenTen. At the same time, annual sales from these prints will raise funds so that the Collection can continue to acquire art by emerging artists in the UK.